Churchill

Home > Nonfiction > Churchill > Page 36
Churchill Page 36

by Ashley Jackson


  I have had for some time a feeling of despair about the British connection with India, and still more about what will happen if it is suddenly broken. Meanwhile we are holding on to this vast Empire, from which we get nothing, amid the increasing criticism and abuse of the world, and our own people, and increasing hatred of the Indian population, who receive constant and deadly propaganda to which we can make no reply. However out of my shadows has come a renewed resolve to go on fighting as long as possible and to make sure the Flag is not let down while I am at the wheel.140

  Increasingly, Churchill viewed the world with a jaundiced eye, though remained determined to meet challenges in a robust and enthusiastic manner. Contemplating the horrendous plight of German refugees, he wrote that “the misery of the whole world appals me and I fear increasingly that new struggles may arise out of those we are successfully ending.” But he found the strength to carry on and to remain ebullient and determined to fight Britain’s corner while attempting to sculpt the postwar world. In particular, he was a champion of the new United Nations organization and was determined that something stronger than the League of Nations would be created this time around. As he told the Commons in May 1944:

  Scarred and armed with experience, we intend to take better measures this time than could ever previously have been conceived in order to prevent a renewal . . . of the horrible destruction of human values which has marked the last and the present world wars. We intend to set up a world order and organization, equipped with all the necessary attributes of power, in order to prevent the breaking out of future wars.141

  He was an ardent believer in such an organization shaping the future, underpinned by the power of the Anglo-American alliance. In September 1944, he was angered when Admiral Cunningham commented that the proposed United Nations would “never be any use to anyone.” Churchill turned on him, saying: “I don’t know why you say that; it is the only hope of the world.”142

  The Yalta Conference was taxing as well as dispiriting. It was, as Churchill wrote in March 1946, “extremely favorable to Soviet Russia,” though the agreement was concluded at a time “when no one could say that the German war might not extend all through the summer and autumn of 1945, and when the Japanese war was expected to last for a further eighteen months from the end of the German war.”143 Churchill’s performance was regarded as superb, and the War Cabinet took the unusual step of telegraphing their congratulations. Roosevelt, in contrast, was nearing death and apathetic. Upon the conclusion of the conference, Churchill drove with his daughter Sarah to Sevastopol on February 11, where the Franconia awaited them. They spent two days on board resting and touring the Balaclava battlefield. But, as ever, the respite was brief. On February 14, Churchill flew to Athens. Since Christmas, when his visit had been accompanied by the sound of gunfire, things had changed, and he was now able to drive with the regent in an open-topped car. A crowd of around forty thousand people greeted him in Constitution Square, where he delivered an emotional speech. That night, the Acropolis was lit up in his honor, the first time this had happened since the German occupation. But such moments of triumph and optimism were increasingly rare. Though Churchill remained “on form,” he was increasingly worried about Russia, America’s apparent nonchalance in the face of communism’s spread, and Europe’s security in between. At dinner with Sir Edward Bridges and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris at Chequers on February 23, 1943, he said, “After this war . . . we should be weak, we should have no money and no strength and we should lie between the two great powers of the USA and the USSR.”144 The difficulties of persuading the Americans to join with Britain in protest at Russia’s treatment of Poland highlighted the fact that after Yalta, as Churchill wrote, “Britain, though still powerful, could not act decisively alone.”145

  In late March 1945, Churchill visited General Montgomery in the field. Then, on the last day of April, came news of Hitler’s suicide in his bunker in Berlin, and a week later of Germany’s surrender. For Churchill, the moment of victory was tempered with regret. The looming power of Russia worried him profoundly, and the world that Britain had gone to war to save in 1939 looked very different from the perspective of 1945. Churchill was also aware that through no fault of his own he had presided over a contraction of British power in international affairs, as the war had exhausted the empire’s resources and thrust America and Russia to superpower status. As if to mark the speed with which events had moved, and how the old contours of world power had shifted, on May 12, Churchill made his first use of the term “iron curtain” in a message to president Truman outlining his fears for the future of Europe. The battle to rid the world of one menace had ended, but another was about to begin. President Roosevelt had died on April 12. Not going to meet his successor, Churchill was later to claim, was his greatest mistake of the war. “During the next three months tremendous decisions were made, and I had the feeling they were being made by a man I did not know.”146

  The End of Churchill’s War

  So a sense of difficulties to come, rather than euphoria, occupied Churchill’s mind as the Second World War came to an end. “Both our great enemies are dead,” he wrote to Clementine on May 2 (Mussolini having been summarily executed by communist partisans on April 28). Despite this, he was busier than ever, looking after the work of the Foreign Office in Anthony Eden’s stead in addition to his own duties. “My hours are shocking but I am very well,” he wrote. He was preoccupied with building the postwar world, striving for “a complete understanding between the English-speaking world and Russia . . . as this is the only hope for the world.” Three days later, he wrote again to Clementine, saying that “it is astonishing one is not in a more buoyant frame of mind in public matters.”147 Really, it was no surprise at all. He was exhausted, and winning the peace was, from a British point of view at least, going to be remarkably difficult. During the last three days he had learned “of the deaths of both Hitler and Mussolini; Alexander has taken a million prisoners; Monty took over 500,000 yesterday and far more than a million today.” While the country geared itself for Victory in Europe Day, Churchill told his wife that “I need scarcely tell you that beneath these triumphs lie poisonous politics and deathly international rivalries.” On May 7, 1945 Lord Moran recorded that “the PM does not seem at all excited about the end of the war.”148 “I feel alone without a war,” he said. “Do you feel like that?”149 Shortly after, capturing the sense of loss and the extent to which politics ruled his life, Churchill told Moran: “It would have been better to have been killed in an aeroplane, or to have died like Roosevelt.”150

  Despite his despondency, Churchill lavished praise on the British people in their great moment of victory. Speaking from the balcony of the Ministry of Health, he said:

  God bless you all. This is your victory! [the crowd shouting back, “No—it is yours.”] It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land. In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this. Everyone, man or woman, has done their best. Everyone has tried. . . . My dear friends, this is your hour. This is not victory of a party or of any class. It’s a victory of the great British nation as a whole. We were the first, in this ancient island, to draw the sword against tyranny.151

  An avalanche of congratulatory telegrams descended. Eden’s read: “All my thoughts are with you on this day which is so essentially your day. It is you who have led, uplifted and inspired us through the worst days. Without you—this day could not have been.”152 Churchill had expected a new coalition government to be formed in order to see the war to its conclusion so was surprised by Attlee’s refusal of his offer on May 21, 1945. This meant a return to party politics, which Churchill found difficult to cope with. What had escaped the notice of most people, including Churchill, was that while the war had elevated him to a unique position above the din of party wrangling, it had caused the most profound leftward swing in British political history. Churchill found it difficult to descend from the plateau of international statesmanship
and return to bread-and-butter national politics. The world was emerging from its darkest hour and a new international system taking shape, one in which the Cold War was to be the defining feature. Churchill believed that no other British politician could influence this process as much as he could so had little appetite for domestic arguments over coal or town planning. The system of government forged by Churchill had allowed the successful delegation of responsibilities in this sphere to Tory and Labour ministers. Nevertheless, Churchill had to enter the electioneering bear pit and put his back into attacking the “socialism” of the Labour Party and sparring with Attlee in the press.

  As had been the case at the end of the First World War, the electorate was uninterested in Churchillian warnings about the emerging threat of Russia or his attempts to puncture unrealistic hopes about what the postwar world held for the British people. With Anthony Eden laid low with an ulcer, the main burden of the Conservatives’ election campaign fell upon Churchill’s shoulders, and he took to it with gusto. The Conservatives hoped to cash in on his war-leader status, and he raged against Labour, conflating his attacks upon it with those on the Soviet Union. His warnings about Labour “totalitarianism”—especially his notorious “Gestapo” accusation—did little to help the Tory campaign.

  On May 23, 1945, two weeks after the end of the war in Europe, Churchill formally resigned and was invited by the king to form a new caretaker government ahead of a general election on July 5. Ministers were drawn from all parties. Churchill did not realize that few people had been as thrilled by the war as he had been, and such was his focus on winning the war and shaping the postwar landscape that he was not in tune with the domestic aspirations of the people. In his defense, however, it should be remembered that the war was not yet over. While a state of euphoria might have gripped the British people on VE Day, it was widely believed that the defeat of Japan would take up to a year and a half, and there were plans to dramatically increase the British role in the Pacific campaign.

  The Labour Party’s pledge of national insurance, new homes, and family allowances caught Churchill and the Conservatives on the hop. To some, Churchill looked like a fox in a hen coop and decidedly old-fashioned. His opponent and soon-to-be-successor, Clement Attlee, summed up the problem: “If Winston couldn’t talk about the war he’d rather not talk at all. The only part of home affairs he was interested in were those which bore upon the war effort.”153 He could also be reactionary; “whenever the Cabinet committee put up a paper to him on anything not military or naval, he was inclined to suspect a Socialist plot.”154 During the election campaign, Churchill traveled the country in a train that acted as his mobile communications headquarters. He was greeted warmly by cheering crowds and developed an unrealistic sense of his party’s electoral prospects, for cheering crowds do not necessarily translate into votes. “I shall be glad when this election business is over,” he told Lord Moran. “It hovers over me like a vulture of uncertainty in the sky.”155 On July 22, he was complaining to those around him about “this bloody election.”

  Churchill’s lack of appetite for the return of party politics and electioneering was perfectly understandable. There was a war still to win and grave concerns about Britain’s ability to influence world affairs in the face of more powerful allies and rivals. In these very weeks, he was preoccupied by the prospect of using the atomic bomb in order to foreshorten the war against Japan. From the outset, Churchill had been ready to share scientific and technological advances with America, an indication of the way in which he saw the two nations walking hand in hand to victory in war and the stewardship of the postwar world thereafter. Britain’s nuclear bomb project had officially begun in August 1941, when Churchill sanctioned research on “tube alloys,” though as the Anglo-American dimension developed, Britain found America unwilling to reciprocate and was brusquely shut out. This was in spite of Churchill and Roosevelt’s spoken agreement in June 1941 to freely exchange knowledge and results. In August 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt had signed the Quebec Agreement, and the Hyde Park Agreement followed in September 1944. Churchill was mindful of how the bomb could shape the postwar balance of power in Europe as well as how it could be used to terminate the war. On July 4, 1945 he was asked for, and gave, his consent to the use of the bomb against Japan.

  Before the Potsdam Conference, Churchill elected to go on holiday at the Château de Bordaberry in Bordeaux, flying on to Potsdam on July 15. The following day, he toured Berlin and viewed Hitler’s bunker and on July 18 conferred with President Truman. By this time, the Americans had detonated an atomic bomb. Churchill, in company with Attlee and Bevin, flew back to Britain on July 25 and prepared for the election results. On the following day, before the counting was complete, Churchill tendered his resignation to the king in what he described as “a very sad meeting.” After thanking the British people for their support, Churchill left Downing Street and headed for Chartwell.

  Despite Churchill’s popularity and unique reputation as a war leader, the general election was a party political vote, not a presidential contest. Labour had simply campaigned better and offered the British people more of what they wanted, in particular a vision of a world that would be better for the average person than that which had followed the last war. The temperature of British politics had altered significantly, as wartime special elections had indicated. When the results were known and the full extent of Labour’s victory clear, Lord Moran remarked on the “ingratitude” of the voters. “Oh no,” said Churchill. “I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very bad time.”

  Winston Churchill’s war was over. The chief of the Imperial General Staff wrote:

  I wonder if any historian of the future will ever be able to paint W in his true colors. It is a wonderful character, the most marvellous qualities and superhuman genius mixed with an astonishing lack of vision at times, and an impetuosity which, if not guided, must inevitably bring him into trouble again and again. . . . He is quite the most difficult man to work with that I have ever struck, but I would not have missed the chance of working with him for anything on earth.156

  In assessing Churchill’s war leadership, Stephen Roskill wrote:

  His ability to see issues in the cold hard light of reality was sometimes clouded by his eagerness to take the initiative. His zeal and confidence in improvisation had contributed to the Norwegian failure. Toward the Far East, he had shown an imperfect grasp of Japanese strength. Yet, on the most important strategic questions, his sense of realism prevailed over other considerations.

  Admiral Pound summed Churchill up by saying that “at times you could kiss his feet—at others you feel you could kill him.”157 Admiral Tovey wrote to Admiral Cunningham that Churchill “as prime minister is magnificent and unique, but as a strategist and tactician he is liable to be most dangerous. He loves the dramatic and public admiration.” The war against Germany had been managed much better than the First World War, and this was “due in part, if not entirely, to his leadership.” Even as a strategist, Churchill deserves more credit than his senior generals and admirals were wont to give him. The general thrust of his grand strategy—above the level at which even chiefs of staff and commanders-in-chief operate—was right. “As a manager of war he was nonpareil,” Ronald Lewin wrote.158 “He never espoused any truly unwise strategic course.”159 Perhaps most important of all, he had offered his country and the world a lead in 1940 that no one else on the planet had been able to give. As Clement Attlee wrote, at that moment of profound crisis, only “one man qualified martially—I saw nobody around who could qualify except Winston. He knew what war meant in terms of suffering of the soldier, high strategy, and how generals got on with their political bosses.”160 His accession to the premiership invigorated Whitehall and “presented an extraordinary optimism against the odds.” He was, in John Charmley’s words, “the essential man.”161 Furthermore, he was then the chief architect of a potent and victorious alliance, “unique,” as Charmley put it, “in all the histo
ry of alliances.” Churchill’s own assessment of his wartime significance was accurate and spoken privately and not immodestly: “My death would have been a loss to our war-making power no one could measure.”162

  8

  A Higher Vision: Postwar Government and a Changing World

  Sometimes accounts of Churchill’s life portray everything that happened after July 1945 as an anticlimax, whether intentionally or not. Churchill appears as a personification of Britain and of British decline. His lifeline tails off as the colossal politician who achieved greatness as leader of the free world in wartime fades against the sinking sun of the “finest hour.” Churchill’s life, so this teleological reading goes, had until 1940 been all about achieving the moment of destiny. What followed was the ineluctable descent from the summit after the attainment of political greatness. This familiar periodization is, of course, as much a reading of British national decline as it is of Winston Churchill’s, a rendition of the accelerating loss of British world power as the “great” moment of war and “standing alone” receded into the background. A new postwar world emerged in which Britain was, by some margin, no longer top dog, and for the first time in centuries, British statesmen had to get used to an international chessboard dominated by others. According to the iconoclast John Charmley, Churchill had presided over a fatal weakening of British imperial power, the arrival of socialism, the appeasement of a European dictatorship, and the dawning of British dependence upon the United States of America—the exact reverse of what he had strived for.

 

‹ Prev